Project Goals

Modify and build upon the city’s publicly released data by allowing users to edit and contribute data, and even start whole new datasets

Create automated processes for synchronizing with the original data sources (City of Portland, Metro, TriMet)

Create tools and examples for developers to use as a jumping off point for creating ‘civic apps’

Wiki-style revision history and conflict management/dispute resolution when users contribute to datasets

Developers

This repository hosts two separate things… the CouchDB web application (CouchApp) that powers PDXAPI and also some helpful utilities for converting and uploading geographic data into GeoCouch. The only dependency for hosting your own PDXAPI-like geo-server is GeoCouch. The pdxapi_couchapp folder contains the full CouchApp for you to tweak and deploy.

If you want to actually use PDXAPI, see pdxapi.com for more information and example usage.

The basic usage is to ask PDXAPI for all objects in a database contained within a particular bounding box. You can see an example of this on the PDXAPI.com homepage. You will receive a GeoJSON feature collection that contains any matching objects. Each object consists of some location data and an ID that you can use to look up metadata for the object by asking http://pdxapi.com/dataset/id

If you are interested in working with a local copy of some PDXAPI data, the easiest way is to set up your own GeoCouch and replicate the datasets that you want using CouchDB’s built in replicator tool.

The utilities directory contains a bunch of geospatial related utilities developed for PDXAPI that are no longer in use, but may be useful as a reference.

datasets.yml is a dataset containing information and metadata for all of Portland’s municipal datasets.

Importing geo data into GeoCouch

GeoCouch can store, index and serve GeoJSON. There are awesome tools like ogr2ogr that are capable of converting many different formats into GeoJSON.

I wrote a tool called shp2geocouch for easily importing Shapefiles into GeoCouch. See my blog post for a tutorial on this process.

Related Projects

shp2geocouch is a rubygem that converts Shapefiles into GeoCouch databases.

License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
‘Software’), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to
permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to
the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY
CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT,
TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE
SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.